Welcome to Twitter city: is there no limit to Jakarta's social media obsession?

How did the world’s largest Muslim country react to Donald Trump’s election win? By satirising it mercilessly on social media, of course. So what’s behind Indonesia’s obsession with viral sharing – and how does it help Jakarta function?

Post-truth ... a meme picturing Donald Trump with cult leader Dimas Kanjeng, who claims he can multiply banknotes with his mind.
Photograph: Reyarifin.com

With more Muslims than any other nation in the world, you might imagine Indonesians would be fearful, or at least dismayed, about the victory of a man who has threatened to ban all Muslims from entering America.

Instead, as it was becoming clear on election night that Donald Trump would be the next US president, Jakartans had already started flooding social networks with satirical memes and comic relief.

Others poked fun at Trump’s relationship with Indonesia’s political establishment, such as former house speaker Setya Novanto, who controversially met the Republican candidate at Trump Tower in New York last September. A meme circulating on Whatsapp, to which Indonesians are partial, showed Novanto shaking hands with various figures – President Joko Widodo, Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”), and at the top, Trump.

The meme poking fun at former house speaker Setya Novanto’s meeting with Donald Trump.

“The joke was that anyone Setya Novanto shakes hands with will become somebody,” explains Desi Anwar, a senior Indonesian journalist and news anchor.

To Indonesians, the irony was clear: Novanto was forced to resign just months after he shook hands with Trump, for allegedly eliciting a roughly $4bn bribe from the country’s biggest mine.

In a developing country prone to natural and manmade disasters alike, where everything from roads to institutions are often broken and politicians rarely keep their promises, Indonesians have adopted a pragmatic willingness to adapt – and, above all, to see the funny side of things.

“We always see the silver lining in the cloud,” Anwar says of the Indonesian sensibility. “If you have an accident and break an arm you think, well at least I didn’t break both arms.”

The predilection for humour has led to an equally ubiquitous habit: an obsession with social media. There are about 80 million social media users in Indonesia, and the country is among the biggest users of Facebook and Twitter worldwide.

Jakartans are among the biggest users of social media in the world. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Regularly trapped in traffic for hours each day, many Jakartans turn to their phones to pass the time and to communicate with friends throughout this sprawling megacity.

Some Jakartans own several mobile phones, and Indonesians in general have taken mass communication to a whole new level.

“There is that village level of wanting to know what is going on even though Jakarta is a metropolis,” says Anwar of the capital, which is home to around 10 million people.

We always see the silver lining in the cloud

Desi Anwar

“Jakarta still has that village mentality of ‘Uh, what’s going on, uh, what’s happening’. That’s why things like weddings are so important. You can’t have a little quiet wedding for 10 people. That’s impossible. A small wedding is something less than 500 people.”

Indonesian film-maker Joko Anwar, who has more than one million Twitter followers, agrees. “Indonesians in general, and Jakartans in particular, liked to socialise, even before the era of social media. We like to talk to strangers, talk to each other about everything,” he says.

“So when social media arrived, it made the habit even more convenient. That is why we are very obsessive about social media.”

In situations that are anything but amusing, Jakartans can always rally behind a good joke. A few weeks ago, after a huge demonstration in the capital turned violent, with police cars torched and tear gas fired, President Widodo, known as Jokowi, gave a televised nationwide address.

The president, who is usually dressed in formal batik or long white shirts, this time donned a khaki bomber jacket.

His wardrobe choice ignited the imagination of netizens seizing a break from the seriousness of the day, sparking an online debate about the brand of the jacket and several trending hashtags, including #jaketjokowi.

When it was finally determined where the jacket was from, the item soon sold out in most Zara stores across the capital.

The obsession cuts both ways politically: social media was also used by Islamic hardliners to drum up support for the demonstration in the first place.

Yet humour still functions as a defence mechanism against misfortune. Under more than three decades of authoritarian rule, President Suharto strongly curtailed free speech. Since his fall, Indonesian media and self-expression have proliferated.

“For so many years we were repressed, we were not able to say whatever we wanted under the Suharto regime,” says Joko Anwar. “That’s why we developed this weird sense of humour: we respond with laughter or humour every time bad things happen, and that carries over to social media.”

There are times, too, when social media and humour are wielded for more serious purposes. During the razor-tight presidential election of 2014, Indonesian netizens crowdsourced the election results, tabulating them online at kawalpemilu.org, to ensure there was no dubious counting.

Boundary-pushing satire, in the form of comics such as Gump n Hell, are also starting to emerge. This Indonesian-language comic, created in 2006 but published weekly on Facebook since March, has been taking aim at everything from censorship to the hypocrisy of Islamic hardliners and cold war-era laws that ban the promotion of communist material.

In response to rising paranoia around communism, the comic creators drew on the recent popularity of the Japanese viral sensation Piko Taro’s video Pen Pineapple Apple Pen, which has been viewed more than 16 million times.

Gump n Hell gave it an Indonesian spin, featuring Piko Taro using an apple and a banana to create the shape of the communist icon, the hammer and sickle.

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Another comic shows the Indonesian national symbol, an eagle, with parts of its body blurred out – a playful stab at the Olympic coverage, where some local television stations overzealously interpreted censorship guidelines by blurring the bodies of female swimming champions.

“I want to confront people, but with humour,” says the comic’s creator, Errik Irwan, a 30-year-old architect from Semarang. “It’s useless if we try and fight with them through force, so we try and fight with them through humour.”

“There is a saying that laughing is the best form of medicine. When things are so bad, you just have to make fun of it, because otherwise you might as well just kill yourself,” says Desi Anwar. “In the tropics, it is always sunny the next day.”

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